They hang from my doorknobs, from the corners of my chairs and sometimes from between my fingers as I walk; prayer beads. tasbih beads. My prayer beads act like braille inviting the divine's mysterious presence into my life. There are thirty-three beads in all. I find their cylindrical shape a soothing comfort when rolled back and forth between my fingers; the weightiness a reminder that we are both earthen and ethereal.
My Turkish girlfriend, Hoda once gave me a set of prayer beads as a gift. Her father had given them to her in good faith to pray for her ailing mother, while upon her last visit to Izmir. She hated her mother with a passion. Her father, on the other hand, gave her everything. She didn't want anything from either one.
"He shouldn't love me so much." Hoda says this in a flat tone as she sweeps her kitchen floor around my foot. I pick at the raw salted green almonds. She serves me hot tea with mint leaves and sugar.
I'm envious. "You're lucky to have a father like that."
"I don't want to be my dad's little girl and he won't see it any other way." She says. "He has no interest in who I am now." Hoda goes and returns smoking a cigarette.
"He loves you Hoda that should count for something." I say.
"Ah, love." She retreats behind her smoke, her eyes on the space between us.
"And when I got home." She continues, "It was 'Hoda do this, Hoda do that.' My mom pushing me around like I was a servant. Her friends looking at me with their cow eyes asking, why isn't your daughter married Sophie? What happened to Walid?"
I listen. I don't know what to say to her anger, her fierce desire for independence. Men come and go in her life as quickly as a change of clothes. She begins to tell me of her most recent man. A computer guy, too innocent for her sharp talons. She's had some fun and now is preparing to dismiss him.
"The guy loves you Hoda, why do this to him?" I ask.
She shakes me off, snuffs out here cigarette, gets up to scrub her pots, pans, her back to me now. I watch as she scrubs with extra vigor, her knot of hair at the top of her head bobbing from side to side.
"So?" she shrugs, "It's his fault if he loves me."
I try to make sense. "Why not keep him around for a while?"
"He's not my type." She snaps her latex gloves off.
"Why see him at all? You're wasting time."
"To find out if he is my type." She says.
"How did you meet this guy anyway?" I begin to wonder if she has a heart at all.
She dries a few pots and places put them away. "In the personals. You should try it."
"No thanks." I say.
She laughs at me for being such a prude. For lacking the sense of adventure she clearly possesses. Outside, the trees rustle, their branches giving way to a sudden gust of wind. Spring is around the corner.
"With my luck," I say "I'd meet an X-con."
"Please. They're just regular guys."
"I think you need to give yourself a second chance Hoda. Find someone you really like. Marry him. You're thirty-three now."
"No." she says this firmly, as if she has practiced the word "no" all her life.
Fifteen years earlier, to escape the marriage proposal from her third cousin Walid, she had eloped with an American GI stationed in Turkey, much to her mother's horror. Her mother never forgave her for this. "You're not our daughter! You stupid girl!" Her mother screamed at her. Mother and daughter threw words at each other like stones. And the stones piled up, until neither would be speaking to the other. Once she left Izmir for America at eighteen, she found herself broke, disillusioned and desperate, in the middle of Kentucky, married to a man she could never love. She told me how she would go into the streets only to return home full of tears. The street signs, it seemed, gave her no direction. After five lonely years, she left for California and crammed her whole life into a second floor single with a roll out bed.
